


I Don't Want To Talk

by stammed_cleams



Category: Dimension 20 (Web Series)
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, Love, M/M, One-Shot, Quiet, Short, Spring Break, Support, Sweet, emotional issues, emotionally repressed lads, pok gukgak issues, soft mutual pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-14
Updated: 2020-02-14
Packaged: 2021-02-27 19:21:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,075
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22720903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stammed_cleams/pseuds/stammed_cleams
Summary: After seeing Pok Gukgak, Riz hasn't been doing well, and it hasn't been easy getting him to be alright again. Fabian takes an approach that he knows will work, because it's worked for him before.
Relationships: Riz Gukgak/Fabian Aramais Seacaster
Comments: 4
Kudos: 142





	I Don't Want To Talk

**Author's Note:**

> hey gang!! im working on something longer but for now here's a little one shot. every tuesday i think 'fabriz can't be that good' and then i watch it on wednesday and im like 'oh boy'. so! i've got another fic with these boys in the works! but for now, enjoy this little snippet fic :>

Fabian crawled through the seats of the van into Riz’s room. It had become very him - a wall covered in pictures and string, a small table covered in papers and a single chair, a simple cot, abandoned coffee mugs stained with jet black coffee grounds. Riz was in there too, but his back was to Fabian, eyes on the board, jittery, jumpy. He looked terrible. There were dark circles under his eyes, his shirt was untucked, his hands shaking as they made the reach between tacks. Fabian, oddly enough, found his eyes lingering to the old coffee mugs. A sophomore in highschool who liked bitter, black coffee, and never drank anything else. There was something metaphorical about that, though of course, Fabian couldn’t put his finger on it.   
Well. He’d have to speak sometime. He got up all the upbeat rambunctiousness he could muster and said, “Hey, the Ball, you mind if I-”  
“Ah!” Riz cried out. He jumped about a foot in the air, shoulders rocketing up, and in less than a second he had twirled around and the sound of a gun had gone off, impossibly loud in the small confines of the room. Fabian’s eyes went wide, a steaming bullet hole in the wall just next to his head. For a moment Riz just stood there, gun out, slitted pupils readjusting before he caught his breath. “Fabian!” he sighed, “You scared the shit out of me, what are you doing?”  
“Well, why are you shooting at me?!” Fabian answered sharply.   
“I thought you were a… a… I don’t know, something scary!”  
“Oh, something scary.”  
“Oh, because, it would be so unreasonable to see something scary nowadays, it’s all we’ve been seeing, use your head!” Riz said, and the paranoid gesture towards his own head showed a little more teeth than usual, took a little bit more work. For this reason Fabian forced himself to remember that he didn’t come here to fight, no matter how many times he shot a gun at him. He was hurting.   
“Alright, fair,” he said, hands up in resignation. Riz had already turned back to the board. “Anyway, I can see that you’re very busy, but I… actually just came in to ask you for a hand with something. You see, Adaine has been collecting this sort of… evidence from the library, generally about arcana, but of course, some of it, is you know, just putting the pieces together which is, essentially, erm, what you do, and she sort of suggested I look at them and I couldn’t really… understand the half of it,” he admitted, somewhat bashfully.   
“Why wouldn’t Adaine just come to me herself?” Riz asked, without turning around.  
“Oh, well… you wanted to be left alone, I’m sure she didn’t want to bother you.”  
“Actually it seems like all anyone’s done is bother me,” he answered sharply, moving a string from one position to another. He shook his head intently, annoyed at himself, and moved the string back to where it was before. “Adaine came in earlier,” he went on, “And Fig, and Gorgug, and Kristen. And in case you were wondering, yes, she already tried the ‘I just have some work for you’ trick and it didn’t work. No, I don’t want to talk. No, there’s nothing wrong with me, no I don’t need anything. So you can just go ahead and go away.”  
Fabian nodded at that. He should have expected it, really. He set his faux-clues down on the desk and took a step forward regardless. “Look, I’m going to be perfectly honest with you.”  
Riz sighed irritably, eyes falling shut.  
“Sometimes, the amount of prying those guys want to do is annoying. When I was all… pnumodia’d up and having that whole identity crisis-thing it was non-stop trying to get me to talk about my feelings, and I was like guys, I don’t want to talk about my feelings, they are so bad!” Fabian explained. Riz had stopped moving now, taking care to listen as he went on. “But the night it was really bad, I don’t know if you remember this, but you camped out in my room, and, um, I don’t know why you did it but I… I liked to believe it was because… Well, I think it was because you, of all people, got what it meant not to be… particularly able to say that you don’t necessarily want to be, you know, alone. Because you know, Gorgug’s pretty open, and Kristen, Fig thinks she’s a closed book but I think we both know that’s not the case. So: here’s my idea. If… you want me to stay - say nothing and just go back to what you were doing and pretend I’m not here. If you want me to go, just give me a good old ‘fuck you’ and I’ll be on my way!” He rambled all this somewhat quickly, but ended on a smile, nervous as it was.   
Riz’s arm was still halfway up, though it was holding onto nothing, just shaking with exhaustion. His eyes were downcast, that feeling in the pit of his stomach having returned. In response to Fabian’s offer, there came a very long pause. When he couldn’t hold it back anymore he switched into berathy crying, and in sudden, uncontrolled gasps he began to sob - only for a moment before he got control of himself again, and the tears stopped coming. His chin hit his chest, and he gritted his teeth - unable to speak - impossibly grateful.   
Fabian took a seat at his chair, finalizing his presence. He sat facing the board of clues, but said nothing about it - not a comment on how it had gotten much more extensive, and made so much less sense since he’d seen his father in Hell. In fact, Fabian didn’t even let his face say much. A minor interest - even while Riz looked away. Just in case he looked back - he didn’t want him to think he was just sitting there, worrying about him. For his sake, he picked up one of the books on Riz’s desk at random, and started reading it. He couldn’t understand a word of it, but nevertheless he made a point of creasing his eyebrows and crossing one leg over the other, and looking distinctly like he were settled on the beach with his favorite corny teen romance.   
When Riz did turn around, he laughed for the first time he had in months. It was soft, and weak - but it was something. “That book’s in goblin,” he objected gently.  
“Is it? I was so riveted I didn’t notice,” Fabian said pretentiously, and went on ‘reading’. A slight smile came to his lips, and Riz let out something between a chuckle and a sob. He looked, for a moment, back to the board. There wasn’t much more to be done, at this point - he knew he’d need more information if he was going to piece anything else together. Nevertheless, it called him. If he went to bed, he’d have to lie there for a while before he fell asleep, thinking about all this. He knew how lovely it would feel, for a while, to get the rest he hadn’t gotten for days and days - to lie dormant and to have the world turn off for a while. The bliss made him dizzy to think about. To sleep per chance to dream - ay, there’s the rub. For in this sleep of death what dreams may come? Strange to see that English class hadn’t fallen so far away from him, even after all this. It was a risk to try and sleep now. The clues were always safe.   
But from behind him, a voice spoke up, gentler than he’d thought that it could be. “Get some sleep, if you like, Riz. Big day of solving mysteries tomorrow. Big day.” Riz turned back to face him. He was grinning, the same smile, still the same smile as it always was. “Spring break, remember?” he reminded him. “I believe in you!”  
“Spring break…” Riz whispered to himself, through a thin smile. After one last glance to the board behind him he let out a sigh and his shoulders sank two inches - he hadn’t even realized how tense they were. He set his gun down on the desk and stretched his arms. He pulled off his sweater vest and untucked his button down, but left that much on. He took off his hat and set it on the desk too - it dimly occurred to Fabian that he rarely saw Riz even this undressed (despite the fact that he was still going to sleep in a full outfit). He couldn’t help but look - not because he was attracted to him. Yes, it was true that he often was, but this wasn’t the time for that. More like flattery perhaps, or surprise. Whether it meant anything emotionally or not he wasn’t sure, but Riz never let anyone see this side of him. It was bewildering to see, his top button undone, bottom of his shirt falling down over the rim of his pants, hair tousled, sleeves uncuffed. For once, he was not maintaining whatever it was he wanted so badly to maintain.   
Without a word he headed to bed, curling up sideways under the blanket, back to Fabian, who remained falsely intent on the words in his book. When Riz was no longer looking at him, he openly looked. Something in his chest ached. He’ll have a nightmare, you know, a voice in his head reminded him. No doubt about it. What will you do then?  
Fabian creased his eyebrows at the figure of his friend, small and afraid. Vulnerable. The answer came to him quickly: I’ll be there with him.   
Comfortable with that answer, Fabian looked at the lamp beside the desk. He reached for it, then resolved to leave it on. If Riz felt alright with the lights off, he would have turned it off, and if Fabian were to turn it off now there was no way he’d mention it. With nothing left to do, Fabian flicked passively through the book. There were notes in Riz’ handwriting, also in goblin. For some reason it didn’t seem to line up that Riz took his notes in goblin, or even that he spoke it - he was such a Solecian, as far as he was concerned, that it didn’t occur to him that he could speak anything else. The book was covered in underlined words, circled words, particularly frantic sharp letters and crossed out ideas, little diagrams beside the notes. Riz didn’t doodle, and there was no common. Fabian was fluent in elven, and could pick out a few words in dwarven, gnomish, or tiefling, but he didn’t know so much as ‘hello’ in goblin. All he saw that held any meaning to him was a sentence so intensely scribbled out in pen that it would have been hard to read if he knew goblin. In the back of the book on the one or two blank pages there seemed to be a bit of a note sheet, with frantic, mis-matched bullets all it. One of them (the one that was scribbled out hard enough that he very nearly tore the page) ended with the word ‘Fabian’, written in common, and then several question marks. His name must not have translated, he thought, or he was just that used to seeing it on common that he had subconsciously switched back. He couldn’t help but go through a few very frightening possibilities of what it could have meant, before accepting that, chances were, he’d never know, and that he shouldn’t really have been snooping in the first place. Regretfully, he closed the book and placed it on the desk beside him. He leaned back in the chair until he was as comfortable as he would be, shut his eyes, and tried to go to sleep.  
There, in the book, in the very back of the book at the bottom of the page, under a layer of scribbled lines back and forth, back and forth, was a goblin bullet point that said ‘suktu ach ni Tentak Kalina skol stritkik - aktz mechach ku zet Fabian????’ With a few grammatical corrections and rough translations, the note said: “Kalina might be able to enter the haven through nightmares - ask Fabian to stay with you????” Then, in shame, it had been scribbled out.


End file.
